As promised in the QA meeting today I have installed an old drop of WS to find the place in Anaconda I thought was there to turn off or not select compression for a disk drive. As it turns out I must have been having a pleasant dream or mistakenly remembered the one for encryption and There was no such box. It's really strange. I have a strong recollection for seeing a box somewhere that had to be check to get data on a disk to be compressed. Sorry for the bad data.
Anyway from the discussion, I am under the impression that btrfs uses compression by default for user's data files. If I am right will there be a way to turn that off?
Have a Good Day!
Pat (tablepc)
On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 04:16:52PM -0400, pmkellly@frontier.com wrote:
Anyway from the discussion, I am under the impression that btrfs uses compression by default for user's data files. If I am right will there be a way to turn that off?
It's still being discussed.
On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 2:17 PM pmkellly@frontier.com pmkellly@frontier.com wrote:
Anyway from the discussion, I am under the impression that btrfs uses compression by default for user's data files. If I am right will there be a way to turn that off?
Upstream doesn't enable it by default. There are a few ideas what it might look like to do by default in Fedora. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1851276
Transparent compression has been in Btrfs since early days. Zlib was supported when it was first merged into the kernel around 12 years ago. LZO followed soon after. Zstd is new, but it's supported since kernel 4.14, which isn't definitely not new in Fedora terms.
But yeah, you'll be able to turn it off. Whether by mount option or by attribute. It may also be reasonable to opt in or out by kickstart.
One option not discussed so far is: do the work to enable it in the installer, and only enable it by default via a GNOME Boxes express installation (injecting a kickstart into the installation). I'm not sure if that's more trouble than it's worth, but it could make for significantly smaller Fedora VMs that are also decently likely to be a bit faster due to (a) typically slower write performance inside of VMs anyway (b) fewer reads and writes results in a net gain in performance due to the compression.